Friends and th eBible
In the six weeks since I first mentioned the eBible web 2.0 resource, I’ve been adding bookmarks to bible verses there, with brief comments.
I tagged verses that mean the most to me, relating to Quaker faith and practice, particularly in the historical context. After marking a handful that I’ve noted for myself over the years, I drew from several other sources as they’ve presented themselves in the last six weeks:
- A discussion here about heart, mind, and soul, in another blog entry
- Wm Penn’s Primitive Christianity Revived, which (as discussed in my Introduction) is mainly about validating the Quaker approach with scriptural references
- Mark Wutka’s frequency analysis of verses cited by early Friends, which he offered recently at his Ear of the Soul blog
- Mark bases his analysis on data from Esther Murer’s Quaker Bible Index, which is a very rich source indeed
- Vail Palmer, in comments in Mark’s blog, offers his own study of Friends, God, and the Bible, which lists citations (implicit and direct) from several chunks of early Quaker writing
From these sources, I picked verses that seemed to me most relevant as stand-alone cites. (Others seemed more meaningful only in the context of the writings in which they were cited.) A few I marked with the tag/topic “quakers” when I thought they were most germane to Quaker distinctives, e.g, hireling ministry, oaths, and manner of worship.
Anyway, this is a first pass at compiling a set of links to specific bible verses, offered as an sample of what anyone (anyone with a modern computer, an internet connection, time and the inclination, that is) can do. My bookmarks can be accessed via my profile at eBible. Most people at eBible now are presenting the normative evangelical Christian theology, but there’s room there for us as well.
The eBible is a “Web 2.0″ service, so it facilitates friendly “invites” and “communities” within the site. I went ahead and created a community for the Religious Society of Friends. Communities are designated as either “Church,” “School,” or “Ministry,” so I made the RSoF a “ministry.” It needed an address, so I put it in care of the FWCC office in Philadelphia :-)
Once you create a username account for yourself, if you go to the page for the RSoF, you can join from there. (I hope no-one thinks they are thereby joining the actual Society of Friends, by-passing the whole “clearness” process, etc.!)
The eBible site is a way for us to pool our notes on the bible, and to discuss (with reference to specific verses) how scriptures have been and are now relevant to us as Friends. I have questions about how the whole “chapter & verse” and “proof-texting” approach can help us with deeper spiritual seeking (and finding), but let’s give it a try.
By the way, for those who are into the technology, the eBible people have a search engine plug-in for the Firefox web browser, so a simple citation in the Book Chapter:Verse[-Verse] format, on any web page, can be brought up in an adjoining tab at the right-click of a mouse.
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November 15th, 2007 at 10:47 pm
Hey, are you sure there’s room for us over there? I notice that all the communities you listed are still pending. They may check us out and then reject us :-)
Anyway, I joined the RSoF community.
November 16th, 2007 at 3:48 am
If you look around, a lot of communities that people have created are still pending. It must be a glitch in their system, that no-one there has time to review and approve the new communities. The rest of it pretty much takes care of itself.
Apparently ‘pending’ communities are added to the functional database of churches that they started with. And for the time being, as long as it’s working okay, they’re not going to mess with it.
I contacted the eBible administrators recently. I didn’t ask them to approve the RSoF community, but I did ask how others might find it. Someone answered, saying “communities that are pending can be found by others still and they can find these by our search functionality or by viewing by state/city.”
Like all Web 2.0 start-ups, they’ve got a rocky row to hoe. In my contact message, I pointed out that the potential in eBible seems underutilized. The person who answered me wrote: “We agree that the community potential is far from being realized and we hope to change that in the coming year. Things are far from perfect but we hope you enjoy the website and community that has been developing over the last year.”
So that’s a hint of the troubles they’re having, and a suggestion that some aspects of the service may change in the coming year. We have to take it “as is,” and hope that they make it through the next phase. As it is now, I think it works pretty well.